This dissertation examines the way Philip Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession and Martin Luther's closest co-worker, sought to establish the relationship between faith and reason in the cradle of the Lutheran tradition, Wittenberg University. While Melanchthon is widely recognized to have played a crucial role in the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century as well as in the Renaissance in Northern Europe, he has in general received relatively little scholarly attention, few have attempted to explore his philosophy (...) in depth, and those who have examined his philosophical work have come to contradictory or less than helpful conclusions about it. He has been regarded as an Aristotelian, a Platonist, a philosophical eclectic, and as having been torn between Renaissance humanism and Evangelical theology. An understanding of the way Melanchthon related faith and reason awaits a well-founded and accurate account of his philosophy. Having stated the problem and finding it inadequately treated in the secondary literature, this dissertation presents an account of Melanchthon's philosophical development. Finding that his philosophy was ultimately founded upon his understanding of and method in rhetoric and dialectics, this dissertation explicates his mature accounts of these arts. It then presents an account of Melanchthon's philosophy as both humanistic (i.e., rhetorically based and practically rather than speculatively oriented) and fideistic (i.e, skeptical about the product of human reason alone, but finding certainty in philosophy founded upon, and somewhat limited by, Christian faith). After a final assessment of claims about Melanchthon's philosophy from the secondary literature, this dissertation considers how such a humanistic, fideistic philosophy might be helpful for Christians in a philosophically post-modern situation. (shrink)

Classical theism has long affirmed impassibility to be both a philosophically sound and scripturally warranted attribute of God. An affirmation of this attribute of divine apatheia is found in the works of theologians and philosophers of classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, over the last century, there has been a significant shift away from this tradition of divine impassibility. Divine impassibility has been challenged from many quarters, especially from Protestant Christianity, as a doctrine foreign to the scriptures of Abrahamic monotheism (...) and philosophically incompatible with a scriptural conception of God as personal, reactive, and relational. Many of the critics of divine impassibility suggest that there is a dilemma for these monotheists: that God may be impassible and yet unable to engage in personal, pathic, or relational ways with creation as the scriptures of the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam suggest, or that God may indeed express some pathos and reactivity but may no longer be understood to be impassible. In this work, I argue that this dilemma is a false one and that a third way, or via media, is possible. In support of the proposal I offer, I provide a critical analysis of impassibilist and passibilist arguments on historical, philosophical, and theological grounds. I demonstrate that strong affirmations of either position are indeed untenable, and in their places I propose a model of divine interaction based on an energetic kenoticism. In the via media offered below, I argue that we may yet retain a robust notion of divine impassibility in the essence or ousia of God, while allowing for a fuller account of divine pathos, reactivity, and interaction with creation via the kenotic and self-limiting divine energies. In this way, we may retain many of the classical commitments regarding the nature of God and yet provide more room to speak to these scriptural accounts of God’s interaction in the cosmos. (shrink)

This dissertation examines Avicenna's theory of efficient causation in light of his approach to central problems in metaphysics, from the proof of the Necessary Existent to his emanative cosmology. Avicenna provides an internally coherent metaphysical account of efficient causation. A metaphysical account of the efficient cause explains the existence of the effect or essence in a way that is not explained by the causes of motion, as investigated in physics. That is, a full explanation of the cause of the existence (...) of an essence is not found in the four causes of natural change and motion. Avicenna aims to clarify what the explanatory division of labor is between the account of the natural philosopher and that of the metaphysician. In so doing, Avicenna develops a theory of causation that ties his innovative concepts of the contingent in itself and necessary in itself to the concept of efficient causation. A central distinction that Avicenna advances in relation to the efficient cause is that between the cause of the effect qua species and the cause of the effect qua individual. The distinction is relevant to understanding his view of the role of the causes of the essence, including the Active Intellect. Drawing on the above theory of efficient causation, the study reexamines Avicenna's famous proof for the Necessary Existent. The analysis shows that his metaphysical account of efficient causation is at the heart of his proof for a Necessary Existent. The "cause of persistence", in particular, is argued to have a more critical role than previously acknowledged, and is explicated in the context of his theory of efficient causation in metaphysics. (shrink)